Community engagement as community development: Making the case for multilateral, collaborative, equity-focused campus-community partnerships

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, we offer a framework for a community development-focused, multilateral, sustainable justice-oriented service-learning and community engagement (SLCE); exploring what it is, why it is needed, how it looks different from other existing and emerging trends in SLCE, and how we believe it would transform the ways in which institutions of higher education (IHEs) think about and approach both community partnership-building and student learning in community contexts. To this end, we draw out the dimensions of a transformed practice of multilateral partnership and demonstrate how it would deeply challenge both foundational understandings and current models. Finally, we discuss how a transformed partnership framework would necessarily alter the way we conceptualize student learning – and the benefits of students’ learning – in community contexts.